FIFA World Cup

If there's a sport that can claim to be truly international, it is neither Cricket nor Baseball nor Basketball. It is Football. More than 200 countries play the game across all 5 continents, though the game has been heavily dominated by teams from Europe and South America. This post is a data visualization exercise for the FIFA World Cup. It covers data from the first FIFA World Cup in 1930 through to the 2014 FIFA World cup but leaves out the 2018 tournament in Sochi, Russia.

This is based off a Kaggle Dataset with a liberal license.

Which country has played in the most FIFA World Cups?

A total of 82 countries have played in a FIFA World Cup at one time or another. Germany and Brazil have played the most often with over 100 matches each! The interesting thing is that the USA where Football is well behind Baseball, Basketball and (American) Football in popularity is in 15th place. Now 15th isn't impressive in itself but it is actually ahead of countries that are more Football-crazy such as Chile, Poland, Hungary etc.